BIOLOGY OF AGING

There are no diseases peculiar to old age and very few from
which it is exempt.-Alfred Worcester (1855-1951)

Twenty percent of all humans who have ever lived past the age of 65 are alive today.
And these older individuals are biologically younger than the old of generations
past: A landmark 1993 study by Duke University found that
the percentage of older Americans in good health is growing at a greater
rate than the percentage of those with disabilities.

Between 1960 and 1990, while the overall U.S. population grew 39%,
the ranks of those 85 and older jumped 232% (the over 65 group increasing 89% while the
number of those under 25 grew by only 13%). A child born today who lives
to age 65 is ten times more likely to reach 100 than people born one century
ago (click here to see life expectancies at age
65 from 1910 on). Now in the year 2000, there are an estimated 100,000 people aged
100+, up from 32,000 in 1990. This should keep Willard Scott busy!

The quest for immortality seems to be an obsession of the human primate--its methodologies
dating back to some of the earliest recorded messages of the past. The search for long (if not everlasting) life is implicit within
Western mythology and within its scientific quests, as in:

the hyperborean beliefs that there are remote pockets of super
longevity around the world, pristine places without the stresses and pollution
of modern urban societies, where the old retain valued social roles. In
the 1970s, for instance, the press carried stories of people living to
extraordinary ages in Vilcabamba, high in the Andes of Ecuador, and in
the Azerbaijan republic of the former USSR. In 1973, for instance, Soviet
authorities reported the death of Azerbaijanian Shirali Mislimov, who supposedly
lived to 168, who was from a republic where there were 63 centenarians
per 100,000 population (compared to 3 in the United States).

the fountain of youth myths, where some wondrous substance or
procedure would extend life, such as young Achilles being dipped in the
pool of immortality by his mother. Such long-lived personalities as Pope
Pius XII, Bernard Baruch, and Somerset Maugham had the cells of unborn
lambs injected into their veins.

Enthusiasms were tempered with Leonard Hayflick's discovery of the finite
divisions of human cells, the so-called Hayflick
Limit--that, at least at the cellular level, we are somehow programmed to
die. After all, if Darwin's mechanisms of natural selection are to work,
old generations must be superceded by the new. But there flickered hope in
the cancer cells of Henrietta
Lacks which, one-half century after whose host's death, live eternally on
throughout the world. Could the death gene(s) be turned off? Enter telomerase
and its ability to lengthen the biological clock. Listen to NPR's
"Talk of the Nation's" "Merchants
of Immortality" (aired June 4, 2003) featuring an interview with
Stephen Hall, author of Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human
Life Extension.

how rates of alcoholism, heart disease and mental disorders increase
with economic downturns.

how cancer rates increase with level of industrialization.

how depression is related to physical ailments. Eleanor Simonsick (Psychosomatic
Medicine, 1995) found that depression among men and women 65 and older
nearly triples their risk of stroke.

how poverty impacts health. Samuel Broder, director of the National
Cancer Institute in 1991, observed how people living below the federal
poverty level have a death rate from cancer twice that of the rest of the
population. Black men, who outnumber whites in poverty 3-to-1, were found
to have a 25 percent higher cancer risk.

how solitude can be lethal. According to a study by Nan Case et al.
(Journal of the American Medical Association, January 22, 1992),
heart attack victims who live alone are nearly twice as likely to die within
six months as those living with someone else. One hypothesis holds that
human contact produces protective hormones.

recent stories of 60-something women giving birth bring to mind James
Tanner's studies of the historical changes in female sexual maturation.
Apparently over the past century and a half the age at menarche has declined
by three-quarters of a month per decade. Data indicates, for instance,
that the average Norwegian girl began menstruating at 17 in the 1840s,
compared to 12.9 years by the mid-1980s. And then there were the mid-1980s
stories of accelerated sexual growth from Puerto Rico, of girls ovulating
as young as 9 months and young boys still in diapers sprouting hair under
their arms.

how cohorts differ in their rates of Alzheimers, brain and lung cancers,
and deafness. Here consider the concept of cohort scars, those distinctive
biological maladies experienced by particular cohorts in old age owing
to the intersection of their biographies with social history. For instance,
in VA hospitals we still see the long term effects of mustard gas exposures
of World War I veterans. In 1983, physicians and statisticians estimated
that, owing to medical advances, the number of infants born with some physical
or mental disorder had doubled in the previous quarter century. What will
be the quality of the lives of these individuals in old age?

"Do you think you look older
than your years, or younger than your years, or do you look about your
age?"

Part of having a social purpose is having social responsibilities, and
this has profound biological implications. Consider the findings below
of Albert Bhak ("Social Integration Patterns and Senile Mortality," presented
at the 1975 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, San
Francisco), who studied the monthly mortality rates for elderly men and
women in three small South Korean villages. The data show the patterns
of deaths of older persons, activity demands, climate, and food supply
over one calendar year.

DEATHS

ACTIVITY DEMANDS

MONTH

MALE

FEMALE

TOTAL

MALE

FEMALE

FOODSUPPLY

CLIMATE

JAN

27

19

46

heavy

heavy

plentiful

harshest

FEB

32

26

58

nil

moderate

adequate

harsh

MAR

24

40

64

nil

nil

mild

low

APR

29

46

75

slight

nil

lowest

great!

MAY

29

32

61

moderate

slight

lowest

mild

JUN

16

14

30

heavy

prime

dwindling

unpleasant

JUL

21

18

39

prime

prime

adequate

harsh

AUG

33

19

52

slight

slight

low

harshest

SEP

18

14

32

heavy

heavy

dwindling

mild

OCT

20

16

36

prime

heavy

adequate

great!

NOV

31

27

58

slight

slight

plentiful

unpleasant

DEC

48

20

68

nil

heavy

plentiful

harsh

Do you observe any patterns? Bhak performed some statistical analyses
and came up with the following correlations of older Korean mortality rates:

CORRELATES OF OLDER MALE AND FEMALE DEATHS

# DEATHS x

MALES

FEMALES

ACTIVITYDEMANDS

-.73

-.86

CLIMATE

.39

.05

FOODSUPPLY

-.15

.20

What does this tell you? First, activity demands produce the strongest
correlation with the number of older persons' deaths--specifically, the greater
the monthly social responsibilities of older persons the lower their death rate
(and, conversely, the fewer the role demands the higher the death rate of older
persons). The harsher the climate
the more likely old men (not women--guess who must be indoors) die. And although
small, the sex difference in signs of the food supply-death correlations
is interesting. Guess who gets fed first.

Alliance for Aging Research--"the nation's leading non-profit organization dedicated to improving
the health and independence of Americans as they age through public and private funding of medical research and geriatric education"